In Depth

The Genius of Giotto

Short in stature, ugly of countenance, merry in wit, and one of the single greatest artistic talents in Western history, Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337) was born a shepherd boy. According to Giorgio Vasari, the renowned artist Cimabue discovered Giotto one day sitting by his herd, scratching a sketch of one of the sheep with a pointed rock on a stone slab. Cimabue took the lad under his wing and into his studio, and it wasn't long before the student's mastery eclipsed that of his teacher. As Dante wrote, "Cimabue thought to lord it over painting's field / And now his fame is obscured and the cry is Giotto."

Other artists, including Cimabue, had begun to introduce elements of naturalism to the rigid, highly stylized Byzantine tradition that had governed European painting since the Middle Ages. But Giotto exploded convention and plunged painting into a Gothic humanism that quickly developed into the Renaissance.

Giotto did more than just paint pretty pictures. He filled his art with the symbolism of a philosophy and a decisive stamp of realism, of painting from nature for the mind. Boccaccio, in one of his Decameron tales just 10 years after Giotto's death, wrote of Giotto's painting as "that art which had been buried for centuries by the errors of some who painted more to please the eyes of the ignorant than the intellect of the wise." The poet went so far as to call him "the best painter in the world." True, Giotto didn't have a good grasp of single-point perspective or a sense of photographic realism -- but to be fair, neither concept had been invented. What Giotto did was portray his biblical characters in a manner unlike any seen before.

The figures in his paintings have bulk under their clothes, they have weight, they're expressive, and they have distinct faces with unique personalities -- they are, in a word, individuals. Instead of expressionless medieval Madonnas with tiers of identical angels arranged stiffly around her as if posing, Giotto's scenes are natural, almost like glimpses of private moments -- the people laugh, sleep, fidget, preach, move, cry, and even sit with their backs turned.

Whether he was helped extensively or merely moderately by assistants in the painting of Assisi's upper church of San Francesco is in some ways irrelevant, because it was Giotto's vision and influence that humanized the frescoes and allowed reality to slip into the paintings. Giotto shows us the crisscross of lumber on the backs of altar crucifixes, friars singing heartily at a Christmas service, and monkish faces wrinkled in painful sorrow at the death of Francis. There are no stylized wails of anguish here, but rather real, heartfelt tears that well up from inside the friars, creating a moment almost too private to view.